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Money math

Ahhh, Kids and money. They go together like a wop bob a loo bop. Nothing teaches math more quickly than money.

Bright and early this morning, this Hero climbed up on my lap with a catalog full of his current favorite toys. Their prices are all listed and he starts telling me how much money he needs to buy each page of toys. He’s doing it in his head and each time came up with the wrong answer. That is beside the point though.

I’ve been talking to the kids a lot recently about how mistakes equal learning. If you never make a mistake, you aren’t learning. You are taking an easy path. If you stretch your wings, mistakes are inevitable.

So while he kept coming up with the wrong answers, we worked together to find the right answer. He had a great understanding of all the concepts such as taking away 3 from 13 so you can add ten and then re-add the 3 back in…or that if he took one set of 12 + 14 and another set of 12 + 14 that he could add that sum to itself to save steps. Really advanced ideas. I love the way children learn math. It has so little to do with numbers and so much to do with great ideas, complex concepts.

In the end, we figured out that most of his mistakes were perfect kindy mistakes. 18 + 3 = 22 because he forgot to count the 20, ie 18, 19, 21 22…Just skipping that 0. Or addition mistakes 8 + 4 = 11 type stuff. The grander concepts, the higher level thinking was all right on track. Heck, he even took some paths to his answers that made me go ‘hmmmm’. He his ideas were solid. Memorization of facts comes in time. Heck, that’s what calculators are for. But to watch the Hero’s 6 yo brain wrapping around big thoughts makes my brain happy.